Previously Written: To The Stupid Kid

My rediscovery of poetry a few years ago started with hip hop. What I didn't know then was that lyricists are really just poets that incorporate a lot of rhyme and rhythm into their poetry. I was very interested in battle rap, rhyming poems that share a common aim: to elevate oneself and simultaneously degrade an opponent. I used to visit online forums and post lyrics against other web emcees. We were judged by other forum goers, who were mostly Canadian underground hip hop fans. I wrote this poem to be a sample of that community. I borrow a lot here.

To the stupid kid who thought he could challenge Tabasco Velasco but had to change his boxers because I made an example of him and verbally curb stomped his British ass in front of his disappointed father and his girlfriend who played Cho Chang in the last two Harry Potter movies and probably never slept with him because the obnoxious Slug wannabe rapped worse than Kevin plays Madden
and Kevin fucking sucks at Madden

In your distress
my hormonal levers
depress, you never guessed
I’d sever your best tonal endeavors
and yes you’re pressed, pinned,
not destined to best me
I attack with cat naps and
make the kill with narcolepsy
you’re a sleeper to my Sean Nokes
snapping off the belt
if you shot a verse
with arrows and boobs
you wouldn’t be felt
you dug in real deep shit
logs hugging your kneepits
sloppy trails
reveal your copy and paste secrets
stiffened like a puppet
and I’m lifting up your strings
I could kill you in two couplets
like a zombie king

Previously Written: Two Hip Hop Snobs Eat Shit

This is the first of many poems I wrote featuring a character named Louis. He represents someone with whom I've been best friends since high school (I'll leave his real name a mystery). In either ninth or tenth grade I would go to his house on Fridays, play videogames and basketball and return home on Sundays, most weekends at least. Anyway, he's a man of very few words and many people find him very difficult to talk to. For this reason I find this poem, which is a paraphrased conversation, very pleasing.

Two Hip Hop Snobs Eat Shit

(Nelly is a mainstream rapper.)
(Jason Kidd plays basketball.)

Me and Louis drink Feldschlösschen at the tram stop

Nelly’s so bad
Really fuckin stupid
You remember that line?
“I’m just kidding like Jason”
“I’m just kidding like Jason!”
Hahaha
Who the fuck is Jason
He just picked a fucking name
I’m just kidding like Bob
Had to rhyme with basement
He’s all – what rhymes with basement
Random ass fucking Jason
Like we know how Jason Kidds

Our eyes meet with horror

Previously Written: Kovalent

I wrote this poem at the 2008 Kundiman retreat. Poetry seems to flow so freely out of you when you're there. Maybe it's the atmosphere. I only know that what little shell guards me was broken for four days.

Kovalent

We're content as sloths. Six species with tummies full of symbiotes, digesting leaves over a month, and we have chemistry
with Mr. Hacker next period. He chases us with boredom, tunnels suck in our eyes over and over throwing our heads balance on drooly palms. I beseech to bathroom but Hacker has elephantitis, "Peps, you pooped last month," no, then I played with my turmoil, he prefers us asleep, when it’s his turn to duty. Smad turkey. He admits thanksgiving dinner aftermath* to our nostrils and we all prostrate. Hacker douses us with Watsons iso tone and his arms and legs champagne, his head sinks into his ribs, his torso poles us into place. Silently the silence comes – is it the end of our world? We are one, we are a robot, a vigilante vindicating through Hackzor’s monocle of justice, dynamiting Mrs. Apted and her physics class strumming gravikords and vacuuming skunks while the thigh magenta grows, grows, then, a comeback, an up smash, an of the fallen living dead sith pink panther nerds*, we see dead people, which limb pointed out the closet empty of economics and theory of knowledge? Love polypeptides yourself because the time is now. Veal patties; they ain’t got dodgeballs on us and we got four more toes.


*Not yet a Cold Stone Creamery flavor

Previously Written: A Violent Welcome

I have wonderful news, my takaw peoples. I was so impressed with a certain Jessika Aldridge's ability to create beautiful images with an effortless flow, and so touched by her work, which is packed full of emotion without becoming melodramatic, that I asked her if she would be interested in becoming a full time Crispy Pata author. It turns out she was just as excited with the thought as I was!

To celebrate, this week's edition of Previously Written features a collaberation between Jessika and I. About a year ago, we were reading a lot of Sean Thomas Dougherty. This poem is a cover of one of his that we worked on together.

Piano Violence

Can you break the keys
over her head in a rhythm?
To plink a tune like a monkey on a
coconut hanging in a window at
Barneys in New York City, with eyes
drooping like an elephants breasts
shortly after birth. Yes, I see sea foam
turn into diamonds off the coast of
Florida on a wintry morning, while shellfish
make love in the garbage.
Sailors poke their Linuses in the sails of the
ship and I wonder if they’ve ever eaten
crabs from the caves in France.
A dessert from the diner just outside of
San Antonio reminds me of bananas shucked from
beaten up pick up trucks by Canadians with
headbands. Frilly dresses of purple and yellow dance
while ukeleles play from a rooftop and
dogs lap at water dripping from a holey anaconda
consuming a fat woman.
You are a prisoner on death row, waiting for burnt
biscuits and sea fairing winds. Alcatraz mothers
you, and I try desperately to gather the sandpipers at
my feet. Your ship stinks off the coast of
Bombay; the cargo on board smells like tea bags and olives.
I give my last toothpick to an old man in a
mall, in Manila, and a little girl asks for a red fox in
sheeps underwear. I reply that foxes only live
in coral reefs and I have never ventured to Sydney.
I stroll to a bend in the road, and fight the
people who ate bread off a plate, plain and dry,
like a piece of sandpaper on my tongue.
I take the left side of the road, because that’s what side
the trees lean to, and I find a factory run by
the Holy Ghost and Mo Rocca. They specialize
in plastic chimneys and air fresheners that only work
next to mirrors in old buicks. I ask them for a flavor of
birch tree and rye, and they tell me that they haven’t
made that since you left for good. See, this is why I need the
phonecall. You were the only one that could keep
the house from rolling onto mice and men.
And when you pick up, you say to me
She is a little girl eating violins.

Previously Written: Super Haiku Experiment

These are six of my first ten poems, not including "Ode to a Hole" and "Ode to Drawing", both of which I wrote when I was nine. I don't remember how those two poems went but looking back at it now I think I was better at naming poems before I hit double digits.

Super Haiku Experiment

Lioness

Predator princess
peripherally predicts
Pepe’s pregunta

Predator princess
Learns from mama to pounce first
Ask questions later

Pounce first, ask questions
later. Why you ask? Because
Mufasa said so.

I like this better

Ghazal ribs implode
from the gravity bomb or
haiku’s fluffy paw

Ghazal ribs cave in
from the wrecking ball that is
haiku’s fluffy paw

The Chase

Spotted hunger sprints
sixty five miles per hour
Run motherfucker!

Previously Written: Adventure

This is a poem I wrote about Magellan. I was reading a lot of Natasha Trethewey at the time, but I don't know if that shows.

Adventure

Explorer of the world, Magellan sailed
his Victoria across the planet’s everywhere,

Rabban beard crisp from the absorption
of salt water. Seeking a path to

the spice islands of Indonesia,
he camped in a smaller archipelago,

of only seven thousand islands. Drunk,
Spain’s adopted son declared the Sugboanons

servants of God and Spain, worse,
pronounced the people of Mactan enemies

of the Church. Ferdinand began his crusade
two weeks later, exacting holy terror

shaped as axes, swords, crossbows, guns
and cannons – all the marshmallows in

16th century lucky charms: Catholic edition.
Boats and artillery left behind

because of rocky waters, Magellan and his top
fifty favorite Spaniards stormed the Mactan

beach to find one thousand five hundred
infidels chilling, their kampilan, spears and poison

arrows rising slowly before they burned
down the wind, suffocating the Westerners

with a rice and fish diet
and a grand putang ina mo.

Filipinos always had great appetites.
Chieftain Lapu-Lapu, ever the hero,

chased Magellan back into the water,
the only thing to love him back.

When Lapu-Lapu impaled
the first man to cross the globe,

he jammed his spear into the sand,
so the explorer would drown

before he bled to death. Five hundred
years previous, those islanders, who slaughtered

the great Ferdinand Magellan,
rode boats of their own to

Madagascar and South America, while
Spain bribed the ruling Moors

with a flat-rate supply of virgins
to postpone the Muslim invasion.

It took half a millennium for someone else to figure out the Pacific.